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All posts for the month December, 2013

If you’re itching to shed that old, embarrassing Yahoo username in favor of something a little more age appropriate, we’ve got good news. Mayer and Co. have just opened up a wish list to request inactive usernames. Plug in your five moniker requests (in order of preference) by August 7th, and if you’re first in line for an account that hasn’t been used in over a year, it’ll be yours by the middle of the month. Once the search giant sends a message to your inbox, simply click the included link within 48 hours and the re-purposed account will be yours. After the initial period, folks will be able to add usernames to a watch list, and will be alerted when they become available. Worried that password recovery messages sent from other services to reused addresses could be a security issue? Yahoo is too.

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Artificial and natural knowledge researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have IQ-tested one of the best available artificial intelligence systems to see how intelligent it really is. Turns out-it’s about as smart as the average 4-year-old, they will report July 17 at the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Conference in Bellevue, Wash. The UIC team put ConceptNet 4, an artificial intelligence system developed at M.I.T., through the verbal portions of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence Test, a standard IQ assessment for young children. They found ConceptNet 4 has the average IQ of a young child. But unlike most children, the machine’s scores were very uneven across different portions of the test. “If a child had scores that varied this much, it might be a symptom that something was wrong,” said Robert Sloan, professor and head of computer science at UIC, and lead author on the study.

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Mayor Bloomberg’s government is often finding ways to keep The Big Apple as connected to the internet as can be. Tuesday, in an effort to bring more connectivity options to its residents (and tourists), the City of New York announced that it’s teaming up with Cablevision and Time Warner Cable to add WiFi hotspots to 32 parks across the five boroughs. Of course, these will be available in addition to free services already provided by companies such as AT&T in select parts of the city. Unlike with similar offerings, however, these new hotspots will require potential users to be Cablevision Optimum Online or Time Warner Cable broadband subscribers in order to get free access. Those who have the proper credentials will be able to connect gratis via a WiFi-enabled device anytime, while non-subscribers can do so at no cost for up to 30 minutes every 30 days, or for 99 cents per day.

The folks at biteSMS had said that they’ll be releasing biteSMS for iOS 7 in beta on December 28th. But they’ve already released biteSMS 8.0.1 beta for iOS 7 today on Cydia, though on a different repository.

biteSMS, in case you’re not aware, is one of the most popular alternatives for the Messages app as it includes number of features like Quick Reply, Quick Compose, scheduled SMS, delivery reports, signatures etc. that are not available in the native Messages app.

Keep in mind that since this is a beta, it has a number of bugs, which you may or may not face. Let us know what you think of the beta build of biteSMS in the comments below.

Update:

It looks like biteSMS 8.0.1 beta wasn’t meant for the public, so it has been pulled from Cydia, which isn’t surprising as it was very buggy. Developers of biteSMS have posted the following update on the situation:

This was for internal testing only, it’s not a beta release, it’s not ready yet. OMG I am freaking out you guys got this when it’s not good enough. It’s annoying you saw it in this state. We are pulling it off shortly (I can’t get to Amazon S3 to pull it grrrrrr).

There’s a bunch of bugs to fix up, some UI improvements and the ARM64 which is going to take a few days before an official Beta is out.

We’ll let you know as soon as the beta is out, stay tuned here at iPhone Hacks or join our Facebook Fan page, follow us on Twitter, add us to your circles on Google+ or subscribe to our RSS feed.

The original Apple-Samsung trial had it all – a gripping plot, stellar cast and lots of intrigue.

Unfortunately, like all too many sequels, the current retrial feels like just a rehash of something that was admittedly a pretty good show the first time.

Where the initial trial brought revelations including new sales figures, early iPhone prototypes and juicy insights into how Apple designs its products, no such new ground is being traversed this time around.

And, while the last trial was about dueling perspectives on innovation, this one is just about money. The first jury already decided which Samsung products infringed on which Apple products. But the judge concluded that the original jury erred in how it calculated a portion of the more than $1 billion in damages it awarded. Apple said Samsung owes it an additional $379 million in damages for the products at issue, while Samsung said $52 million is a proper figure.

From a cinematic point of view, the best thing one can say about this installment is that it is short. Each side is allowed only eight hours of witnesses, compared to the 25 hours both parties had during the original trial. Testimony is due to wrap up today, with closing arguments expected Tuesday.

Perhaps the biggest star in the retrial, Apple marketing head Phil Schiller, took the stand late last week, beginning his testimony Thursday and wrapping up on Friday morning. But most of what he said dealt with the kinds of details surrounding the iPhone launch that he shared the last time he was on the stand.

On the bench is the always entertaining Lucy Koh, the same federal judge who presided over the first case. Koh, a rising star, is known for her sharp wit and strict adherence to the clock. She famously suggested during the first trial that one of Apple’s lawyers was smoking crack if he thought he had time to call as many witnesses as he proposed.

The supporting cast is also familiar, including many of the same lawyers, expert witnesses, etc.

Like any big Hollywood production, though, there were at least enough good moments to make for a decent trailer.

Some of the best drama came before the trial itself, during jury selection. Judge Koh dismissed 11 prospective jurors found chatting about the case. Also not on the final panel were one potential juror who called Apple a bully and another who was a former Apple store employee and current stockholder but had nonetheless promised to be impartial.

Of those who actually made it onto the jury, there are five with iPhones, one Sony user and a Nokia owner, but none with Samsung phones.

Witness testimony was largely a rehash of the first trial, though Schiller got in a couple zingers, including when he was asked if he recognized a certain Samsung tablet. “I can’t tell. From here it looks like an iPad to me.”

As most of the case is about damages, the most important witnesses – if not the most exciting – are the experts who try to put numbers on how much Samsung should pay.

There was considerable back and forth concerning Julie Davis, one of Apple’s key experts. On the stand, MIT professor John Hauser, another of Apple’s expert witnesses, extolled her qualifications, noting that she was in the accounting hall of fame.

“Not to disparage,” Samsung’s lawyer said, “but she’s in the Hall of Fame of Accounting at her college, Kansas State.”

“It’s still a pretty impressive honor,” Hauser said.

“I’m glad you are impressed by it,” Samsung’s lawyer said.

Samsung’s expert, Michael Wagner, testified that he held Davis in the highest regard, both personally and professionally. He then spent the rest of the testimony disagreeing with just about every part of her report, though he did give Davis a smile as he exited the stand.

For those who want to catch what’s left of the courtroom drama, the final testimony is expected this morning, followed by summations on Tuesday. But if you miss this week’s action, don’t worry. Another sequel is in development, with a new trial scheduled for next year in the same courthouse to decide if a new crop of products violate various Apple and Samsung patents.

Apple versus Samsung Full Coverage

RELATED POSTS:

Apple: Samsung Case About More Than Money (But We’ll Take the Money)

Jury: Samsung Owes Apple Another $290 Million

Samsung Seeks to Have Current Apple Case Put on Hold Following Patent Office Action

Samsung Says Apple Is Trying to Patent Pretty Phones and Shouldn’t Get More Than Another $52 Million

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda: Apple Makes Case for Why It Deserves $379 Million More From Samsung

Today is that twice-a-year day when the world pays attention to big iron. The latest edition of the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers is released, coinciding with a conference being held in Denver.

The main thing you need to know is that the most powerful system in the world is the same one that topped the list in June: The Tianhe-2. It’s a system developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, and it is capable of running at 33.86 petaflops. (A petaflop is a quadrillion* calculations per second.)

This supercomputer may be in China, but it’s packed with a lot of American-made chips. Specifically, Intel chips. Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each of them containing two Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge-generation processors and another three Xeon Phi processors, which adds up to a combined total of 3.12 million computing engines all being harnessed to work at once.

Unless you work with one of these machines, there’s not much reason to give a lot of thought to them in daily life. But they’re performing a lot of important functions from which you probably derive some indirect benefit. One of the systems on the list is involved in predicting the weather for the U.S. National Weather Service. Others may be helping a bank keep track of your money, or mapping genomes, designing drugs, or using complex mathematical algorithms to simulate all manner of complex things, from the planet’s climate to nuclear explosions.

There was no change among the Top 5 systems on the list from June.

Titan, a Cray XK7 system at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, remained the No. 2 most-powerful machine. Capable of 17.59 petaflops, it uses 261,632 Nvidia-made K20x accelerator cores as its computing backbone. And, while it may have only about half the computing oomph of its Chinese rival, it’s the second most power-efficient system on the list, consuming only 8.21 megawatts to Tianhe-2 s 17.8. Titan was the reigning world computing champ before Tianhe-2.

At No. 3, again, is Sequoia, an IBM-made BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. No. 4 is Riken, a Fujitsu-made machine in Japan that topped two years ago this month. No. 5: Mira, an IBM machine at the DOE’s Argonne National Lab.

The highest-debuting new entry on the list is Piz Daint, at No. 6. A Cray XC30 installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, Switzerland, it’s the most powerful machine in Europe, and is the most-energy-efficient one in the top 10. It, too, has a lot of Nvidia’s K20x accelerator chips powering it: 5,272 of them to be exact, making for a total of 73,808 cores.

At No. 7 is a Dell-made machine called Stampede, installed the University of Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin. In June, it was No. 6. The next three machines rounding out the Ttop 10 – two of them in Germany, and one in the U.S. – were all made by IBM.

By way of measuring the march of supercomputing progress in the last six months, here are a few other highlights from the overall list to chew on. There are now 31 machines that can boast top performance of one petaflop or better, up from 26 on the list in June. And the entry point – the minimum performance required to make it onto the list – is 117.8 teraflops, up from 96.3 six months ago.

Intel chips are by far the most popular computing engine used in the systems on the list, showing up in 412 of the 500, or 82 percent. Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices were in 43 systems. IBM’s Power chips were in 40 systems. Nvidia’s GPU-based accelerator chips show up 38 systems.

Hewlett-Packard sold more of the systems on the list than anyone, accounting for 195, or 39 percent, of the 500. IBM was second, with 166 systems. If you added up the total computing performance of all the systems from each vendor, HP would rank fourth, while IBM would rank first.

Geographically, the U.S. is still the supercomputing leader, and is home to 265 of the systems on the list, up from 253 six months ago. Europe was second with 102, down from 112. China had 63, and Japan 28.

This is the 42nd time this list has been put out. It’s a joint project run by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim in Germany, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. You can see the full list here.

The list pretty much covers the waterfront in listing the supercomputers publicly known to exist around the world. For the most part, the universities and other entities that have them, like to brag about their position on the list when they can. What the list doesn’t cover are the secret machines that might be used by government agencies like the U.S. National Security Agency and similar government spy shops around the world. One wonders if there’s information about just such a machine in the files of Edward Snowden.

* Quadrillions come after trillions, in case you hadn’t been keeping track.

(A small correction: I initially said Titan – number two – was the most energy-efficient system. It’s actually Piz Daint, number six.)

It has been just three months since the once email-centric file-sharing service YouSendIt changed its name to Hightail, but it sure feels like longer. When I spoke with him yesterday, CEO Brad Garlinghouse felt the same way. It has just been that kind of year for the company.

A new mission brought with it a new name that’s intended to better reflect everything the company can do. And now there are new investors, too.

Hightail said Tuesday it has raised a $34 million Series E led by Western Digital Capital, the investment arm of Western Digital, the hard drive manufacturer. Accolade Partners is also a new investor. Previous investors Alloy Ventures, Sevin Rosen, Emergence Capital, Adams Street Partners and Sigma Partners also participated.

It’s the first new funding for Hightail since 2010, when it raised $15 million in a D round, and it brings its total capital raised to nearly $83 million. During most of that time, the company hasn’t been hurting for money, running on cash from its operations.

So how has business been since the name change? “Candidly, we were very apprehensive about the change. But within a month we saw traffic and activity up,” Garlinghouse told AllThingsD.

One reason for the new funding is expansion in international markets. Hightail recently opened offices in London and in Australia, and has been working furiously to localize its service for markets in Europe. In just the last month it has completed new versions in German, Spanish and Italian.

Hightail has also been quietly acquisitive. In September it acquired adeptCloud, a file-sharing and collaboration outfit that focuses on privacy. “They do some very clever things around key management and document control and watermarking,” Garlinghouse said. “There’s a lot more interest in privacy now. It’s the Edward Snowden effect.”

That’s on top of Found, a cloud-searching service Hightail acquired in January.

In its previous incarnation, YouSendIt, Hightail had built up a trusted brand name. It boasted a user base of 43 million people – free and paid combined – using its service in 193 countries and pretty much all of the Fortune 500.

File sharing is a tough space in which to compete. DropBox, Box and Microsoft’s SkyDrive are all fighting for the same enterprise users that Hightail is going after. But Garlinghouse’s hope is that Hightail’s historic relationship with a lot of those same corporate users will turn out to be an advantage.

There’s also more to it than storage. Garlinghouse is hoping that large companies will pay for enhanced services like access control, extra security and activity logs. “Anyone can offer file storage in the cloud,” he said. “Our way of differentiating is what you can do with those files after you’ve uploaded them in the cloud.”